Dr. von Hildebrand gained even wider attention as a television regular on the Eternal World Television Network, which airs exclusively Catholic-themed programs throughout the country. She appeared about 80 times, often as a guest with the very popular Mother Maria Angelica, who founded the network and hosted a talk show.
Her fan base was so great that when she became too weak to travel abroad, wealthy fans sent their private jets after her.
“She had amazing energy,” Mark Gottlieb, an Orthodox rabbi and board member of the Hildebrand Project, said in a telephone interview. “It was a profound grace and power of the soul to just resonate from the outside and draw you in with her words, her ideas and the very power of her personality.”
Alice Marie Jourdain was born in Brussels on March 11, 1923 to Henri and Martha (van der Horst) Jourdain. Her father, who owned a small business, was a deeply religious man and attended mass every day, which made a deep impression on the young Alice.
After the German invasion, she and her sister were sent to New York to live with a wealthy aunt and uncle at the Waldorf Astoria. Alice attended Manhattanville College but later transferred to Fordham, where she met her future husband.
Dietrich von Hildebrand was himself a refugee. As a professor at the University of Munich, he observed and openly opposed the rise of the Nazis in that city in the 1920s. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Dr. von Hildebrand fled to Vienna, where he founded an anti-Nazi newspaper. When Germany took over Austria, he fled again, first to France and Spain and then to New York.
Madame Jourdain became his student and assistant, and in 1949 received her doctorate in philosophy.
She is survived by her sister, Marie Laure Gillis.